Rasicm: an inherent human trait....needing ownership by each of us

 merriam-webster.com/dictionary defines racism this way:

    a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

    also: the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

    also: a political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its principles

collinsdictionary.com defines Babel, (also called Tower of Babel) this way:

Ø a tower presumptuously intended to reach from earth to heave, the building of which was frustrated when Jehovah confused the language of the builders (Genesis 11:1-9) probably in the City of Babylon

Some say the tower is a metaphor for the idea that humans thought/believed/conceived they could reach heaven without God’s help. In the novel Fahrenheit 451, the tower represents confusion. That society does not want people to think, and therefore does not want confusion, which would cause people to have to think and to make decisions. (enotes.com). Books which obviously have different authors and therefore different views would not be welcomed in a society which desires, or insists on unity of thought.

Academic researchers and theorists who have studied that roots of racism have a commonly known list of causes. Among them are the following:

Self-interest; scientific racism; maintaining the status quo; discriminatory policies; ‘good’ people who do not challenge racism; media representation; living in an echo chamber; failing to recognize racism in oneself; quick judgements; casting blame. (from… humanrightscareers.com)

Writing in bbc.com, on April 5, 2020, Tom Oliver says this:

Humans are the most cooperative species on the planet—all part of a huge interconnected ecosystem. We have built vast cities, connected by a global nervous system of roads, shipping lances and optical fibres. We have sent thousands of satellites spinning around the planet. Even seemingly simple objects like a graphite pencil are the work of  thousands of hands from around the world, as then wonderful essay I-Pencil quote below, describes:

          I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolise, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. IO have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane ort a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this Earth knowns how to make me.

(The) combination of nature and nurture shaping our attitudes and behaviour is apparent in many human characteristics, and unpicking some of these examples can help us see opportunities to steer the process…..Instead of acknowledging and protecting us from the innate drive to binge on unhealthy food, however, our modern cultures (in many countries at least) actually exacerbate that particular problem. The result is two billion people-over a quarter of the world’s population—who are overweight or obese, while another two billion suffer some kind of micronutrient deficiency….The cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand has shown jhow environmental shocks can cause societies to become ‘tighter’—meaning the tendence to be loyal to the ‘in-group’ gets stronger. Such societies are more likely to elect authoritarian leaders and to show prejudice towards outsiders…The same goes for the coronavirus pandemic. While many hope such outbreaks can lead to a better world, they could do exactly the opposite. This enhanced loyalty tio our local tribe is a defence mechanism that helped human groups pull together and overcome hardship. But it is not beneficial in a globalised world, where ecological issues and our economies transcend national boundaries. In response to global issues, becoming bigoted, xenophobic and reducing cooperation with other countries will only make the impacts of our own nations worse…..

In our current climate, summarized partially, by a few data points:

·        271 mass shootings in the United States so far this year

·        19 million AR-15 rifles in U.S. homes

·        The Canadian government currently committed to holding two special and separate days of debate to deal respectively with Antisemitism and Islamophobia

·        The discovery of 231 bodies of children buried in a mass grave associated with a residential school in Kamloops British Columbia, with supportive testaments of the same number of childrens’ shoes on city halls, and other public locations across the country

·        The unveiling of a deliberately sunken ship on the bottom of a river in Mississippi with 161 slaves in the hold some 400 year ago

·        The deliberate truck assassination of a family of four Muslims out for a Sunday evening walk in London, Ontario, leaving a young boy victim orphaned. At this moment, terror charges have been laid against the perpetrator of this crime by Canada’s Attorney General.

·        Multiple murders of most black men by law enforcement officers in the U.S. over the last several months, beginning with another public outcry following the “kneeing” death of George Floyd last summer.

·        Synagogues, mosques, and the people attending or near such buildings have been attacked by what have been determined to be racially motivated hate crimes.

Obviously, the whole history of residential schools in Canada, the conflicts between protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, the current conflicts in Yemen, Lybia, Syria, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo….the history of racism in every country on the planet….seems not to have even a moderating tendency, let alone an end point.

If we are more likely to revert to tribalism under the spectre of existential threats, and the number of such threats seems to be continuing to grow, and our shared capacity and political will to confront and to wrestle those threats to the ground, if not to their demise, then, it would seem that we are in for a protracted period of even more events that demonstrate hatred of humans by other humans.

However, these tensions and open hostilities, whether they are institutional, governmental, gang-spawned, religious, ethnic, territorial, political, economic, and whether or not they take the form of military/armed conflict, cyber crimes, biological warfare, individual or militia-spawned insurrections, or even trade and financial competitions, they are all similar in a number of ways:

First, they cross all national boundaries, even if the participants have different ethnic or skin or religious or political identities.

Identity politics, as a lame attempt to regain some form and face of recognition, is a feature of the life of every human being, whether or not it has a group identity which claims injustices are being perpetrated on it.

Isolating national forms and faces of racism does not and cannot rub out the shared responsibility we each shoulder for our own serious, critical, and concentrated look into our own mirrors, in search of how we deeply know, and possibly even deeply regret our own inadequacies around prejudice, racism, superiority, inferiority, special status, even or especially if those feelings are inherited, and baked into the cake of our native culture.

Each of us has personal experience and evidence of incidents, examples and tragic stories of the implications of racism in our own home towns. In my case, the racism that prevailed focused on the relationship between the indigenous communities and the local white population, as well as between the protestant and the Roman Catholic communities. The latter found expression in the July 12^th Orange Parade, the meaning and implications of which were never explained to young people growing up in the 1950’s. The protestant victory of William of Orange over the Roman Catholics on that date would have served as evidence enough to ban the parade, or should have. The serious tensions in the local high school between indigenous and ‘white’ students at one time, prompted one reservation to withdraw their adolescents from the public institution and transport them to a nearby private school. Programs and curriculum and activities inside the public school have since developed and far different approach and set of attitudes among both indigenous and non-indigenous. And that development is a testament to the long and enduring work of sensitive, creative and courageous faculty.

Talking about, holding public debates even in parliament, public declarations by political leaders that there is no room for racism in our country, while noble, are essentially superficial, hollow, meaningless, and even patronizing to those whose ‘rights’ and respect those leaders are attempting to support. So too is the specific passing of laws that make racism and hate crimes illegal, although they are necessary if we are to begin to make any progress in owning and de-weaponizing our racist attitudes.

There is no single institution whose public duty and responsibility is to eradicate or ameliorate hate from our streets, our law enforcement agencies, our schools, our churches, our universities and colleges, or our business enterprises. And thus, there is also no single agency charged with the job of both monitoring and educating our communities on the dangerous threats, not only personally, but culturally as well, to our increased dependence on hard power in our personal relationships.

If we are ‘hard-wired’ to hard power, in our communities, and we take more than a passing glance at the hard-power commitments of nation states, and we indulge ourselves in the exercise of hard power in much of our shared entertainment, and we permit our political leaders to indulge themselves (and their supporters) in language replete with images of violence, conflict, racial superiority/inferiority, then how can we expect even a modest reduction in the incidents, the open conflicts, and the shooting of international flights from the open skies, the crippling of needed energy supplies, the bankrupting of institutions, and the continual race-baiting that, like another infectious virus, seems to have been already implanted in each of our psyches.

Catastrophizing, whether about environmental disaster, or pandemic perpetuity, or cyber-crime and the impact of bitcoin, or of the inherent racism that plagues so many of our differences, is neither a solution nor a crime. However, our shared tendency, in public discourse, at the elected level, supported significantly at the academic level, to objectify, to identify with nominal indicators as evidence, and then to debate theoretically, while useful and occasionally operationally effective, tends to suck the blood and the guts and the human toll from the debate. Legislating, too, has itself an air of detachment, public avoidance and insouciance, and thereby a protective bubble around the politicians to dance, to equivocate, to pontificate, and to do very little, if anything, about how we are tormenting ourselves and each other with racism bigotry, superiority, inferiority, and our little banal attempt to hold onto to whatever little morsel of status and importance we cling to.

It seems that in our defensive, obsessive clinging to our own scarcity, in whatever ways and forms and faces we picture that scarcity, victimhood, insecurity, fear, inadequacy, and depression….we are much more likely to sustain, and potentially even enhance the chances that we will grow and not weed out the seeds of racism among us. And that defensiveness is not exclusive to ordinary people; it is rampant among those ‘important’ individuals who occupy centre stage in our lives.

Their own humility, authenticity, straight-forwardness, and matter-of-factness, in their assessment of their own potential, and their capacity to separate their (and our) wishful thinking from real achievable change, can and will go a long way to addressing our shared predicament(s).

Our humility, authenticity, honest and critical self-assessment, too, can and will contribute to a culture in which integrity shoves the many lies we are being fed, and also willingly consuming, to the side of our public debates.

It was the late Eleanor Roosevelt, herself the First Lady of the United States, who told her, and her nation’s truth: the overarching sin of the people of the United States in their wishful thinking.

C.S. Lewis would have concurred:

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort of truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

I deeply wish the Anglican bishop who instructed me that the “people cannot stand too much reality” would have read and reflected on the words of both Mrs. Roosevelt and Professor Lewis.